The piratical black patch De Toth sports over his left eye almost cost him his life. Scouting for locations in Egypt shortly after the Yom Kippur war of 1973, De Toth was kidnapped, pistol-whipped and interrogated by a group of vengeful young men who had mistaken him for Moyshe Dayan. He only escaped with his life after a quick examination of his groin bore out De Toth's claim that far from being an Israeli commander, he was not even Jewish.
Born in 1913 as Tóth Endre Antal Mihály, DeToth earned a degree in law from the Royal Hungarian Pázmány Péter Science's University in Budapest in the early 1930s. He garnered acclaim for plays written as a college student, acquiring the mentorship of Ferenc Molnár and becoming part of the theater scene in Budapest.
DeToth segued from there to the film industry and worked as a Writer, assistant Director, Editor and sometime actor. In 1939 he directed five films just before World War II began in Europe. Several of these films received significant release in the Hungarian communities in the United States. He went to England, spent several years as an assistant to fellow Hungarian émigré Alexander Korda, and eventually moved to Los Angeles in 1942.
Based on his Hungarian films, the production work for Korda and writing he had done on American projects during earlier stints in Los Angeles, he received an oral contract as a Director at Columbia Pictures from which he ultimately extricated himself by litigation. DeToth preferred working as an independent and had no "A" budgets early in his career. Thus, he had to supplement his directing income with writing assignments, often uncredited. Introduced to Westerns by John Ford, he worked mostly in that genre throughout the 1950s, often bringing elements of noir style into those films.
In 1951 he received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing (with co-writer william Bowers) for the story filmed as The Gunfighter. While largely remembered as the Director of the earliest and most successful 3D film, House of Wax, DeToth also was responsible for two of the noir cycle's most unusual examples: Pitfall and Crime Wave.
DeToth lost sight in one eye and wore a black eyepatch; as a 1994 report in The Independent noted, this almost cost him his life:
In 1996, he published his memoir, Fragments – Portraits from the Inside (London: Faber and Faber, 1994; ISBN 9780571190393).
On October 27, 2002, DeToth died from an aneurysm, aged 89. He was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in the Hollywood Hills.
